I'm highly sceptical of the Fermi paradox being a meaningful paradox at all. I don't think we have nearly enough data to make any conclusion at all about the fr

I'm highly sceptical of the Fermi paradox being a meaningful paradox at all. I don't think we have nearly enough data to make any conclusion at all about the frequency of intelligent life in our own galaxy, let alone the universe. We've only started finding exoplanets in the last few decades, and the frequency of exoplanet detection was very low for most of that time and is still growing today. The ability to learn much of anything about the environments of these planets is even more recent, just a few years since the launch of JWST, and still very limited. It's still only "reliable" for fairly large planets, mostly gas giants. And even for those planets our ability to model the data is an area of active, painstaking research. The number of planets whose atmospheres we have any data-backed information about is very very low. So it seems like the only real argument for the Fermi paradox(certainly back in the 50s when Fermi proposed it) is that we haven't been visited or received any communication. But even that's worthy of doubt. Indeed, our ability to detect and characterise very small objects in or passing through the solar system is fairly limited even today, and was practically non-existent before. It seems very plausible that alien probes could have visited our solar system many times without us noticing. It could for instance be the case that this is only possible by way of technologies that can't easily decelerate and so they've only passed through. We'd have to be pretty lucky to spot something like that, at the size it would likely be, passing through only for a short time(given the speed it would have to move at). As for radio signals, the amount of funding that goes into projects like SETI is not exactly earth-shattering and also hasn't been going on for very long. It's a pretty fringe area of research. The amount of interference from earth-based radio sources also makes this research quite difficult. I'm not some UFO nut, btw. I'm not arguing for conspiracy theories involving the US government, alien abductions, yadda yadda. I'm just asking what do we really know? Not very much, it seems to me.